Regular expressions have always been a bit of a mystery to me. I knew they were very powerful, but they've never been very intuitive. In the past, I've been fortunate to work with developers who could build them for me. I also have the book Regular Expression Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach
Eventually, I realised that I needed to learn Regex properly, so I bought Regular Expressions in 10 minutes by Ben Forta
I first heard about Lucene a few years ago, as it's used to power the search functionality in BlueDragon. Although that makes it sound like an open-source version of the Verity Search Engine software, it is so much more. I've been using Lucene on my current project and have turned into a big fan. I bought the book Lucene In Action to help, and I've been equally impressed with the book.
I've recently been using a Java for a project, which I hope to blog about later. I haven't done any Java development since version 1.2 back in 2002, so I had a a bit of catching up to do. I also needed to update my library with some Java material.
The last few years have seen a huge shift towards building Rich Internet Applications, with technologies such as AJAX and DOM scripting to the fore. Unfortunately, the web is littered with bad examples. This book shows you how to do it properly.
When a website is running slow, the traditional response has been to look at optimising the application code. In fact, 90% of the response time is taken downloading and rendering the page and it's constituent elements. In the book High Performance Web Sites, Steve Souders describes 14 rules for improving front-end performance.
I've been using subversion (svn) for several years now, and love it. I'm relativiely new to Trac though, and it was only on a recent contract that I got to try it.
From my brief experience with Trac, it's obvious that (like many other good software applications) it can be used in many different ways. However, sometimes you can miss out on the better ways to do things and conventions. I bought this book, as I wanted to see how Trac is normally used.
10 years ago, there were barely any books on building websites, let alone running an internet business.
Back then, as a veteran of the first dot.com bubble, I witnessed directors insisting that the Internet was a totally new way of doing business. Many people believed this, and the bubble grew. Eventually though, people started looking at a very old business element - profit - and it soon became apparent that age-old business rules still applied...
Up until recently, most of my JavaScript work has been fairly minimal. Most javascript form validation is dealt with by cfform, and the main other uses have been for simple things like pop-ups. There's been a few more complex development tasks, but nothing of considerable scale.
Recently though, I've started looking at the new Ajax functionality with coldfusion 8. Although a lot of this is already in place out of the box, I realised that I needed to brush up on things.
As the owner of over 50 IT related books, I've come to realise that the majority will fit into one of three categories:
It's this last category that JavaScript — The Definitive Guide (JSTDG) very definitely comes under.
